What I'm Looking to Learn at Umbraco CodeGarden 2016

What? no?!? Wait, what - You don't even know what that is?!? What's that? - Sit back down sir or I'll stop the bus and ask you to leave?!?!?

*Ahem*

Well, in just about a week, I'll be flying out to Denmark to meet the Umbraco team at their HQ for the "infamous" yearly Umbraco developer conference, Code Garden.

There's alot to be excited about. Spread over a 3 day conference, there's 27 (!!!) sessions, 3 full workshops, "all the coffee you can handle", the intriguingly-named Umbraco Bingo (described as "infamous", "unmissable") and of course, everyone who's anyone in the Umbraco community will be handily located nearby, easily accessible for me to annoy them with my endless questions.

That sounds awesome.

My team's been using Umbraco now for around a year and a half. We've chosen it for the rebuild of some of our biggest websites - and are even considering doing our company's colossal CRM rebuild in it.

We've definitely invested alot in Umbraco - but there's still some big question marks in our heads concerning it's use and how it will fit into our workflow as we continue to build projects with it.

So it's my job for Code Garden - between all the bingo, socialising, and 'pull requests', to find answers for these questions.

How would Umbraco fit into our current CI/deployment workflow? We're using AppVeyor CI and WebDeploy onnon-umbraco projects, but because Umbraco document types/media types/etc. aren't recorded in the source code so they can't be turned into database records by the CI server.

We've been deploying to our servers with packages right now but for us to Umbraco some of our bigger projects we really need a way to use the CI server.

How can we make sure new clones have a working copy of the site?
We generally like to ensure fresh clone-ers already have everything they need to get a working copy of the site - but again because we can't commit the document types/media types/etc in Umbraco, new clones must be provided with a package or a .sql file before their copy will work.

How can we avoid committing Umbraco into source control? We're using the Umbraco NuGet package, but when a package restore is run on a new clone a PowerShell script is run that generates aload of config files (including Web.config). We could just use the Umbraco.Core package and commit the rest of the CMS, but we'd really prefer not to.

These problems must already have been solved - but we're either just too stupid to figure it out or too introvert to have met the right people who can let us know how to solve them.